Real time tissue deformation is an important aspect of interactive virtual reality (VR) environments such as medical trainers. Most approaches in deformable modelling use a fixed space discretization. A surgical trainer requires high plausibility of the deformations especially in the area close to the instrument. As the area of intervention is not known a priori, adaptive techniques have to be applied.

We present an approach for real time deformation of soft tissue based on a regular FEM mesh of cube elements as opposed to a mesh of tetrahedral elements used by the majority of soft tissue simulators. A regular mesh structure simplifies the local refinement operation as the elements topology and stiffness are known implicitly. We propose an octree‐based adaptive multiresolution extension of our basic approach.

The volumetric representation of the deformed object is created automatically from medical images or by voxelization of a surface model. The resolution of the volumetric representation is independent of the surface geometry resolution. The surface is deformed according to the simulation performed on the underlying volumetric mesh.